


Hardly A Thought

by Secret Staircase (elwing_alcyone)



Category: Zero | Fatal Frame, Zero: Akai Chou | Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly
Genre: Angst, Between Seasons/Series, Comment Fic, Domestic, Gen, Not Quite Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-09
Updated: 2011-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-16 19:51:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwing_alcyone/pseuds/Secret%20Staircase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Packing for the move to Himuro Mansion, Ryozo discovers a box of papers he'd all but forgotten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hardly A Thought

‘Don’t leave your study until last,’ Yae said when they began packing up their posessions in preparation for the move to Himuro Mansion. ‘You know that’ll take the longest of all.’

But of course, Ryozo did leave it till last. He didn’t really think it would be as bad as she said; after all, the bookshelves were tidy, his notes organised in neat books all kept together. He cleared his writing desk every night before bed. His study looked perfectly in order, and so he made the mistake of thinking that packing it up would be an easy task.

So it might have been, if Yae were the one doing it, or one of the young men they were paying to help them transport everything. But Ryozo simply couldn’t let anybody else clear his study – what if they mixed up his books? What if they lost something valuable? No, he said, pretending not to see his wife’s look of resignation, of course he must do it himself.

He started with the best of intentions. No one could fault him on that score. And surely he couldn’t be blamed if, upon discovering a book he hadn’t opened in several years, he decided to stop work for a while to have a look through it. And if there were half a dozen such books, well...

‘Yae!’ he said, when she came in with a tray of tea. ‘This is extraordinary! Can you see how this corresponds with the legends of Tono? Listen...’

He read aloud from the latest book he had found, and she listened patiently, half-smiling.

‘That’s wonderful, dear,’ she said when he was finished. ‘Are any of the chests full yet? If so, I’ll tell the men to carry them downstairs.’

Ryozo looked up guiltily. He had almost forgotten he was supposed to be packing. ‘I’m not quite at that stage yet,’ he admitted.

‘Are you sure I can’t help you?’

‘It’s fine,’ he said, closing the book decidedly. ‘I’d rather do it myself, so that I’ll know where everything is when we arrive. I’ll be finished by tomorrow morning, see if I’m not. Besides, you ought to be resting.’

‘Just as you like,’ she said, getting to her feet again rather stiffly. ‘I have a few more things to see to, but then I think I will have a nap. I’ll send Mikoto to you, shall I?’

‘All right,’ he said, taking down another stack of books from a high shelf and quickly looking at their titles. He put them all in the chest without stopping to examine any of them, which wasn’t easy to do, when he knew one of them had a folk-song in it that he rather thought might share many of the themes present in the passage he’d just read to Yae.

He made better progress after that, and had filled the chest; he’d managed to fit the contents of the bookcase inside, and was checking the highest shelf for loose papers when his hands met something that wasn’t a book. He brought it down to look at.

It was a box of plain, dark wood, its lid thick with dust. He couldn’t remember what was in it – couldn’t even remember putting it there. For a moment he entertained the thought that it had belonged to this house’s previous owner, but that couldn’t be: the bookcase was one he’d brought here.

He opened the box and found it full of loose sheets of paper, soft with age, yellow-brown like autumn leaves. The writing was faint on them, the names scattered over the pages slowly disappearing.

He remembered them now.

He sat down without taking his eyes from the letters, putting the box on the floor and keeping the thin, sad little bundle of papers in his hand.

The topmost were in Mr. Makabe’s strong, practised hand, all the notes he’d made about Minakami Village – the ones he’d given to Ryozo before sending him away, the ones that hadn’t been lost when the village had disappeared. Beneath those, Ryozo’s own disorganised attempts at a study of the village’s folklore were waiting to make him smile sadly at his own untrained mind, his intemperate enthusiasm. And under that...

He knew what would be underneath, and he hesitated. Reading his dead teacher’s research was one thing – all great scholars left their words behind when they died – but boys from remote villages who died young were a different matter. That was assuming Itsuki had died at all, which was never going to be certain, not when the village had disappeared from the world, not when the only woman to escape had no memories.

For a while he’d hoped that some of them might be alive – Itsuki and Mutsuki, Sae and Mr. Makabe, and maybe others, maybe Itsuki’s little sister and the children Ryozo had spoken to, and, and...

But no, they were almost certainly dead. And Ryozo wasn’t sure he wanted to reawaken this particular ghost.

‘Father!’ The high, happy voice made him jump, and some of the letters fell from his hand. As they fell to the floor, he saw fragments of sentences: _the guardian deities statue beside the – to ask the priest, but that night – butterflies everywhere, and the earth is rumbling, and I – but if you promise you’ll – because nothing changes here, and nothing ever will._ Then fat, childish hands were scooping the papers into an untidy pile, and his daughter held them out to him, beaming.

‘Mother said to come and see if you needed help. Here are your papers, Father. Is that helping?’

He patted the top of Mikoto’s head, smiling, glad to be distracted. ‘It certainly is. Your mother’s very wise. Obviously I need an apprentice.’

He put the papers back in the box, fastened the clasp and slid it sideways into the chest, where it would be held in place by all the books.

‘Now, my young apprentice,’ he said, ‘I need your help in a very important task.’

With Mikoto sitting atop the chest to hold the lid closed, it was just possible to secure it so it wouldn’t burst open on the road. He sent her off to fetch one of the men to carry the chest downstairs, and began to strip the books from the second set of shelves, and hardly thought of Itsuki at all.


End file.
